Computer data is vital to today's organizations and a significant part of protection against disasters is focused on data protection. Conventional data protection systems include backup storage, for storing organizational production site data on a periodic basis. Another conventional data protection system uses data replication, by generating a copy of production site data of an organization on a secondary backup storage system, and updating the backup with changes. The backup storage system may be situated in the same physical location as the production storage system, or in a physically remote location. Data replication systems generally operate either at the application level, at the file system level, or at the data block level.
One metric commonly used to select a data backup plan is RPO (Recovery Point Objective). RPO describes the interval of time that might pass during a disruption before the quantity of data lost during that period exceeds an organization's maximum allowable threshold or “tolerance.”
Continuous data replication systems can be used to continually stream data (in either synchronous or asynchronous modes) to a remote site. Continuous data replication can provide low RPO, but may be less efficient and more costly compared to backup systems. Backup storage systems may also include deduplication and remote data replication capabilities, but generally at much higher RPO compared to continuous data replication. Many organizations use both continuous data replication and backup storage replication to replicate data to a single remote location.